


Can't Have Regrets if You Can't Remember Them

by roadtripexpert



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Because I can, Found Family, I really wanted to explore her as a character and wow is she fun to write, Loss, M/M, Trauma, also there may even be....a plot, i love one (1) messed up asshole and it's lily wright, lily didn't come to King Falls, lily has issues guys, lily is the angst, references to the L-word, so jot that down, so...ambiguous time frame, the angst is lily, this is technically a reunion fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 06:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20810816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roadtripexpert/pseuds/roadtripexpert
Summary: She says, “Okay.” She picks up her phone. She unblocks Sammy’s number. She calls him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Strange Torpedo by Lucy Dacus
> 
> This is set in an AU I've been mulling over for some time, set in an ambiguous time-line where Lily never came to King Falls, Emily's back and things haven't really been getting better or worse. Except for Lily and Sammy. They've been getting worse.

It’s well past midnight when she gets the call. She’s nursing her third glass of wine and re-watching the L-word. She does this almost every night. She tells Pippa it’s because she can’t sleep when Pippa grimaces at the emptied wine bottles in Lily’s recycling.

She starts getting boxed wine.

She tells herself it’s because she can’t sleep. Better than pills, right?

Anyway, the wine makes her a little bit more flexible, a little bit happier, less abrasive, less sad. So, she gets at least a little wine drunk every night and watches her comfort show, so sue her.

Maybe that’s why she picks up the phone. No one should be calling her at this hour, but her impulse is that maybe it’s Pippa. _Calling to say what, Lily? God. _

She picks up the phone.

“Hello? Is this…sorry, I don’t know who you are, my colleague,” and with this the caller stretches out the word into something ridiculous, “is being weird and told me to call this number and tell you to unblock his number and I’m really really really sorry for bothering you so late. Holy shit it’s two am and I’m so sorry.”

Lily’s brain has a bit of trouble processing any of that.

“I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number,” she says, slowly, thickly.

“Oh shoot, okay.” Then there’s a long silence where he seems to be figuring out what to say next and Lily should hang up but she doesn’t, she just puts him on speaker and puts her phone down. She feels heavy. “Um…does the name Sammy Stevens mean anything to you?”

It’s not like the name should make her entire world collapse around her. But sometimes it does. Not as much as Jack’s. Not nearly as much. But close. Sometimes. Sometimes she’s not sober and the name hits her like a fuck-ton of bricks. She’s vaguely aware that the man who just said Sammy’s name is still talking.

“Yes, I’m still here,” she says faintly.

“Oh. Okay good I thought…I don’t know, Sammy’s acting weird I wasn’t sure what to expect.”

Lily nearly laughs out loud. This has got to be one of the most surreal experiences of her life. She realizes she is far drunker than she should be. If she were sober she wouldn’t want to jump off a bridge. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

“Oh, by the way, you’re live on air right now.”

That snaps her out of it.

“Excuse me?” She’s ice-cold again. She can feel it seeping through her. The dread and anger and hurt that started the moment she heard Sammy’s name.

“Oh, yeah,” the man on the other side of the phone chuckles nervously. “We can…I can step out if you want some privacy.”

“No, no I’m fine. I just…Sammy’s still doing radio?” She tries to sound as calm and uninterested as possible. And, God, she should really just hang up. She doesn’t want to know what Sammy Stevens is doing right now, where he is. But then the voice says something else that stops her cold.

“Yeah. King Falls AM radio, we’re a local—”

She cuts him off, “King Falls.”

He stutters to a halt. “Yes?”

She’s so cold. She wonders if it’s shock. She wonders if she’s going to be okay after this, if this is what her life is going to become, picking up the pieces that Jack Wright and Sammy Stevens left behind in her life. She wonders if this is what she felt like after Jack—

Well she doesn’t remember most of it. That happens when you drink. When you drink so much you black out, and then do that every night for almost a year. Then you don’t remember much. She thinks she might have been boiling. She might have been burning up. Now she can’t move, whatever it is freezing her from the inside.

_It’s not fair._ She quashes that thought as soon as it hits her.

“Hi? Hello? Are you still there…Ms…?

“Wright. Lily Wright.”

“Oh! I…um I think I know you, from your podcast?”

“Sure you do.” She breathes. This feels okay, this feels fine, she can do this. “Did Sammy say anything else about why exactly he deserves for me to unblock his number?”

“I don’t know…” she can feel the man getting uncomfortable. “Listen…a lot of weird stuff happens in this town, but Sammy doesn’t usually get agitated like he just did, and he never just leaves. I just…I’m scared for him okay? It’s…he’s putting himself in danger.” There’s an urgency in his voice that Lily hadn’t noticed before.

“I don’t care.” There. That’s it. She should hang up now. She doesn’t.

“Um…okay, don’t hang up, I’ll just tell you what happened. So, uhhhh,” he seems to be trying to put something delicately and failing, “there’s this dangerous part, of this town, and we don’t talk about it or go there, but there was a disturbance, and someone called it in,” he’s talking so fast now that Lily can barely keep up.

“And as soon as our friend, uh, got to the scene Sammy’s eyes went _so_ wide and he told me to call _this _number and tell _you _to _talk to him._ So, I don’t care if you care or not, he’s my best friend in the world and I love him and I’m worried, so will you please please just call him! I’ve tried like ten times and he’s not picking up and neither is Troy.”

At the end of it he sounds a little breathless. Lily feels nauseous. Or maybe she’s scared.

She says, “Okay.” She picks up her phone. She unblocks Sammy’s number. She calls him.

Sammy sounds like he’s crying. It takes her a few seconds to realize that. Another few to realize that she is not prepared to talk to him. And again a few more to realize that this must be about Jack. There are no other options. No way out.

_Oh God, he’s really dead. _She thinks. _He’s dead and his body is in King Falls. _

In some ways, it’s comforting to know that Sammy’s first thought would be to call her.

“Lily? Thank God.”

She swallows. Is she crying too? She doesn’t check.

“Sammy.” That’s all she can say. She doesn’t know whether to yell or cry or both. Or hang up. That’s always an option. An option she probably should have used as soon as she heard his name.

“Lily he’s here.”

Her stomach fills with poisonous ice. She doesn’t think she could move if she wanted too, it hurts to speak.

“Who’s here, Sammy?” she doesn’t know if he can hear her, she can barely hear herself. Everything is accompanied by a low, long buzzing.

“Jack.”

Long, slow tears run down her face.

“What do you want me to say, Stevens, I told you so?” She hisses, stumbling on a sob at the end.

“No, Lily, Lily,” Sammy seems to be trying to fix something with his tone, but what is there to fix? She furiously scrubs at her face, her anger making her warm enough again. “He’s alive. He’s here. He…I found him…he found us.”

She stands up, abruptly, the room twists around her. She stumbles, falls against the wall.

“What?” She feels almost okay, saying that. She feels like she could laugh at what a great fucking joke the universe thinks it must be playing on her. “Fuck you, Stevens.”

Then she hangs up.

She sits back down. The panic sets back in. She frantically fumbles for her phone and calls him again.

He’s relieved. “Lily. I’m not joking. I would _never _joke about Jack. _Ever_. He’s right next to me in the ambulance, we’re heading to the nearest hospital, Lily, I need you to be here, he needs you to be here.”

She believes him. It’s simple. They both love the same person. They are familiar in the ways that each of them loved. Lily knows what Sammy’s happy crying sounds like. She knows when he’s lying. And he’s not lying. Either he’s trapped in some miraculous lie, or he’s telling the truth, and she doesn’t know which one she could live with more.

Because, if Jack is alive that means she gave up on him. Lily Wright gave up. And she doesn’t think she’ll ever forgive herself for it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She breaths in, breathes out and tries not to think of what she’ll say when she sees him: I’m sorry. Please be sorry back.

The sky is orange and pink in the stratosphere. She booked the first flight she could, left Pippa a voicemail, shoved the contents of her laundry basket and her laptop into her suitcase and left within the hour.

Now she’s nervously clutching a plastic water bottle and looking out the window. It’s all she can do. Her life is changing. It’s changing color, it’s changing temperature. She briefly wishes the pressure in the cabin would destabilize so she could just knock out. She shakes her head. The clouds are redder than before.

The lady next to her glares at her. For a moment she doesn’t realize why, then she looks down, he hands and making fists around the water bottle. She looks away and back at the clouds. They are so red that they hurt to look at. Lily savagely thinks, _good_.

She hasn’t slept at all, she doesn’t think she ever will ever again.

But she does, thankfully, semi-peacefully, wrapped up in her own unsteady future.

The first thing she thinks when she wakes up is: _I didn’t tell Mom_. The second thing she thinks is: _Ow. _Right, hangover. Check, check and check.

She doesn’t have to tell her mom. As far as Lily’s concerned, she doesn’t have a right to. But then again. Sammy thought of her. Even when she hit him so hard across the face after he told her and she could see the hurt and the pain and the desperation in his eyes. Even when they had both screamed at each other over the phone. Over the funeral. Even after the dead silence, and a blocked number that read: It’s Not Worth It.

She’s crunching the water bottle again. The lady stares. She stares back.

They’re landing. Lily feels something expand in her chest, a rapid terror, filling her so completely that she might suffocate. Drown in her own fear.

She checks her face briefly while she washes her hands in the airport bathroom. She looks like shit. Her hair is tied back in a pony tail and she’s still wearing what she was wearing when she got the call: no bra, a shitty t-shirt from their old station, sweatpants, a cardigan pulled on hastily while she ran to her Uber. Her eyes are red, her face is puffy. Lily almost doesn’t recognize herself. Except she does. She knows this face better than she knows many things. 

Pippa’s called a total of eight times.

“Fuck,” Lily mutters as she walks out of the bathroom, fumbling with her phone and her suitcase. She feels detached and drifting. She calls Pippa back.

“What the fuck, Lily.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

A pause.

“Is everything alright?” Leave it to Pippa to know something was wrong.

Also, Lily doesn’t remember what she said in the voicemail. She’s fining out that it might have been cryptic and distressing by Pippa’s tone.

“No.” It’s everything she can do to stop from crying.

“Do I need to come and get you?” Pippa’s doing damage control and Lily hates it. Hates how much her voice calms her. She’s saying _“Do I need to stage an intervention?”_

“No.” She can’t speak more than one word at a time, stubbornly weaving her way through the airport. She can’t stop moving. She can’t slow down, she can’t speed up. She’s in neutral.

“Where are you?” Pippa’s trying different tactics.

“I’m going to King Falls.”

“Lily.”

“I’m okay. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Lily, don’t hang up on—!”

Lily almost makes it outside before she starts crying. Almost.

The drive is longer than she expected, driving maybe an hour on the highway and then over what seems like thousands of old back rocks with cracked blue asphalt. She managed to pull it together to rent a car, and she’s doing just fine on the roads until the GPS cuts out and she gets monumentally lost.

She’s driving in circles. She knows she is because she keeps seeing the same goddamn signs and she knows she’s close too. This fact is slowly driving her crazy when a sheriff’s patrol car pulls up to her. She grits her teeth.

_Fantastic._

She pulls over and tries to practice a smile. She can’t.

A man walks out of the cruiser and taps on her window. She rolls in down.

“Looks like you’ve managed to get yourself a little lost here.”

He sounds friendly enough. Lily manages a grimace.

“Yes, I am. And I’m sorry if I’m being rude, but that really isn’t any reason to pull me over, is it?”

“Not unless I was gonna try and help you out. You see this is a pretty common occurrence. There’s an apparition of sorts that likes to turn people around in about these parts.”

Lily wants to scream.

She takes a deep breath. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t care about your fucking ghost stories. I’m here for my brother who is in the hospital, so if you could so kindly point me in that direction that would be great.”

The man’s face goes white. He stares at her for a while with what Lily hopes isn’t pity.

“Right. Sammy said you’d be coming. Right. Well, you can follow me, I was heading up there anyway.”

Lily breathes in, breathes out as the man makes his way back to his car. How long has Sammy been here? Do people know about Jack? Somehow Lily doubts that, she knows him. He’s always been scared about what other people think about him.

She breaths in, breathes out and tries not to think of what she’ll say when she sees him.

_I’m sorry. Please be sorry back. I can’t forget. All I do is forget. How could you forget. I want. I won’t. Please. Family. Stay with me, stay with him, I’ll take it all back. Or I meant all of it. Every last word. Why weren’t you there. I needed you. You don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. We gave up. I gave up. We don’t deserve him._

_I’m sorry. Please be sorry back. _

She breaths in, breathes out.

The hospital is blinding in the early morning light, everything reflecting off shiny sterilized surfaces. Lily squints.

“Relationship to patient?”

“Sister.”

The nurse gives her a once-over. Troy (that’s his name) stands behind her and awkwardly gives a thumbs up.

“Room 186, second floor.”

Her first thought when entering the room is that there are too many people. She can’t even see the bed. She can’t focus on any one person but she thinks there are three or four and it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel hers. Her second thought, as the people clear the space around the bed is: _Jack._

His name rings in her head like the inside of a bell. She feels time wobbling around her like a newborn calf. She walks slowly, her cardigan clutched around her like a shield. His face is so gaunt, so little. He looks a thousand years old. Lily sits down heavily. She buries her face in his chest, feels his beating heart, and bursts into tears.

Only later will she feel a hand on her shoulder, flinch, and look to see Sammy, his grown-out hair tangled around his face, and a small hopeful smile she hasn’t seen in four years. She says

“Thank you. For calling.” Her own voice sounds far away.

“Thank you for—I didn’t know if you would believe me.”

She practices smiles. She can do that now.

“I know you Stevens. Of course, I believed you.”

Jack still hasn’t woken up. But he will, he’s going to make it. The thought leaves something warm and alive and happy in Lily’s chest. She might never be okay, but she can see her own guilt mirrored in Sammy’s face, she can see that maybe they’ll get through this together.

“I’m sorry.” She looks up at him, the years of not seeing Jack are still suffocating her, but she can almost feel the ice melting.

He smiles, laughs a little. “I’m sorry too.”


End file.
